that, in his
judgment, no such man as Smith lived. What would you think of Mr.
Smith if he fell into a rage, and brought his heel down on this little
atheist bug and said: "I will teach you that Smith is a diabolical
fact!" And yet if there is an infinite God, there is infinitely a
greater difference between that God and a human being than between
Shakespeare and the smallest bug that ever crawled. It cannot be;
there is something wrong in this thing somewhere.

I am told, also, that this being watches over us, takes care of us.
And the other day I read a sermon (you will hardly believe it, but I
did); I had nothing else to. I had read everything in that paper,
including the advertisements; so I read the sermon. It was a sermon by
Rev. Mr. Moody on prayer, in which he took the ground that our prayer
should be "Thy will be done;" and he seemed to believe that if we
prayed that prayer often enough we could induce God to have his own
way. He gives an instance of a woman in Illinois who had a sick child,
and she prayed that God would not take from her arms that babe. She
did not pray "Thy will be done," but she prayed, according to Mr.
Moody, almost a prayer of rebellion, and said: "I cannot give up my
babe." God heard her prayer, and the child got well; and Mr. Moody
says it was an idiot when it got well. For fifteen years that woman
watched over and took care of that idiotic child; and Mr. Moody says
how much better would it have been if she had allowed God to have had
his own way. Think of a God who would punish a mother for speaking to
Him from an agonizing heart and saying, "I cannot give up my babe," and
making the child an idiot. What would the devil have done under the
same circumstances? That is the God we are expected to worship. I
range myself with the opposition. The next day I read another sermon
preached by the Rev. De Witt Talmage, a man of not much fancy, but of
great judgment. He preached a sermon on dreams, and went on to say
that God often visited us in dreams, and that He often convinces men of
His existence in that way. So far as I am concerned I had rather see
something in the light. And, according to that sermon, there was a
poor woman in England, a pauper who had the rheumatism, and there was
another pauper who had not the rheumatism; and the pauper who had not
the rheumatism used to take food to the pauper that had. After a while
the pauper without rheumatism died, and then the